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Cinémas

Loving Texts Two at a Time : The Film Remake

Leonardo Quaresima

Cinélekta 4Volume 12, numéro 3, printemps 2002

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Quaresima, L. (2002). Loving Texts Two at a Time : The FilmRemake. Cinémas, 12(3), 73–84. doi:10.7202/000736ar

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Loving Texts Two at a Time: The Film Remake

Leonardo Quaresima

RÉSUMÉ

Cet essai cherche avant tout à mettre en évidence lepeu d’intérêt porté par les théoriciens du cinéma à lanotion de remake. L’auteur examine les différents typesde remake et les définitions proposées jusqu’ici et isolequelques-uns des traits caractéristiques de cettepratique. Il porte une attention particulière auxmodifications que ce remaniement opère sur le texted’origine.

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to illustrate, first of all, how littleinterest film theory has shown in the notion of theremake. Beginning with a discussion of the principaldefinitions of the remake and its principal varieties, theauthor isolates some of the most characteristic practicesin the process of remaking. The article draws particularattention to the ways in which the remake alters theoriginal text.

I.It would be interesting to examine the question of the film

remake, not only in its simplest and most common manifesta-tions, but by considering it from the more general perspective oftextual plurality. My frame of reference is not so much empiri-cal—that of a film’s multiple versions—but is rather more fun-damental: that of the multiple or plural quality of the filmobject itself. Today this quality is more elusive, but in earlycinema it was more apparent. Here the originality of a film

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co-existed in perfect harmony with the ability to reproduce it,with the multiplicity of its versions. Responsibility for editingwas delegated to the projectionist; this would further reinforcean individual film’s multifarious existence. The “work” (the doc-umentary view or the short fiction film) was more an abstractsynthesis of different forms of manifestation than a stable entitywith its own physiognomy, which could give rise to differentversions and forms of corruption (of these, forged and plagia-rised copies are the most obvious). From its birth cinema com-bined the attractions of novelty with repetition. At the sametime, in doing so, it freed the “new” from notions of uniquenessand authenticity (except when it was necessary to assert suchthings for reasons of competition or to protect its legal status).In early cinema, reproducibility was widespread and, so tospeak, “natural.”

In the succeeding period of stability (Film d’Art, Autorenfilm,the institutionalisation of the feature film and the distributionmonopolies, issues concerning copyright) the film took on a sta-tus similar to that of other works (of art, or of the culture indus-try, where the warranty that a work circulated in a certified formwas an essential part of the process of institutionalisation andwidespread distribution). Yet the seriality of the work’s concep-tion and presentation problematises or calls into question thisvery physiognomy. The international circulation of productsfuelled later processes of multiplication, even when “targeted,”programmatically differentiated. Moreover, the rapid growth ofmodes of representation and of institutional models (in additionto models derived from cultural context and taste) broughtabout widespread practices of remaking and reproducing.

With the arrival of sound films at the end of the 1920s, aseemingly stable situation was again set in motion. Here too,this occurred under the sign of the multiplication of the forms asingle work could take. The multiple versions of the early soundyears institutionalised this phenomenon not only on the level ofproduction and representational models but also in the veryway, theoretically speaking, that the film “object” was identified.Genre is one area in which this same plurality shows itself. Herecan be found the strongest forms of regulation and institutional-

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isation of it—these forms reach the limit of the notion of work,original, author, and at the same time they avoid crossing thislimit.

The remake is a phenomenon both well-known and immedi-ately recognisable (even by the non-specialist). The term is com-monly used in everyday language and film publicity campaignsalike, and yet it is a phenomenon whose status is undefined. Wemight even say that it is a phenomenon which has lacked andcontinues to lack any theoretical approach. What are the reasonsfor this lack of attention on the level of devising a theoreticalapproach, of thinking about the remake? It could be the resultof the remake’s anti-authorship quality. For the remake, valuelies in the text (a tale, a story, a subject): in the text’s inherentresources, its anonymity, and its independence from authorialguarantees of legitimacy.

Even on the level of its mode of production the remake seemsto contradict some of the tidiest models. That of the star system,for example. The remake contradicts the supremacy of the actorand the uniqueness of the movie star—or at least the identifica-tion of the actor with his or her character, which is so powerfulin the star system. The remake demonstrates (and takes as itsstarting principle) that Norman Bates, for example, can bedivorced from Anthony Perkins. This, if we think about it, is aquite audacious and almost reckless challenge. But there is aneven more important reason. As I said at the beginning, theremake calls into question the very notion of an individualwork. In this way it resembles, let me point out again, the mul-tiplicity and reproducibility inherent in early cinema, a cinematolerated as an anomaly, or described as primitive or even as castaside, effaced. Naturally, plurality in the remake (as it is in genrefilms) is regulated, identifiable, and motivated. But we still findourselves in an anomalous aesthetic system in comparison withthat promoted by the humanistic conception of the work of art.

If anything, we see in the remake the valorisation of thescreenplay, which takes on a status similar to that of the play ormusical score. This is, if you like, an act of restoration, return-ing the film to the traditional models of theatre and music. Atthe same time, it is an act of audacity, in that it challenges the

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imperatives of originality and novelty (which constitute thefoundation of the entire film industry: who goes back to see afilm they’ve already seen?). Out of this, undoubtedly, cinema’sallography is reinforced or redoubled (I refer here to NelsonGoodman’s definition of the “allographic” and the “autograph-ic,” re-proposed by Genette in his work L’Œuvre de l’art, 1994and 1997).

II.Let’s examine some possible definitions of the remake with

respect to other processes which involve relationships amongtexts and, in particular, with respect to the development of seri-ality.

We could, first of all, think of the remake as part of a trend,typical of the postmodern, towards nostalgia. This perspective,although it captures one aspect of the phenomenon and helps tointerpret it in the present-day context (by which I mean theprofusion of remakes in cinema today), does not grasp its truecomplexity. Rewriting, in the realm of the postmodern, is acommon literary practice, but in literature this practice seemsfar removed from the naïveté, the “virginity,” which seems to setsuch practices apart in cinema. This constitutes proof of theremake’s particularity, of its well-defined identity, which can beconfirmed after the fact by the absence of the concept of“remake” in literature. In the postmodern aesthetic, rewritingpresents itself as a “challenge to the canonical work” (Dolezel,1999, p. 225). Is this an aspect of the film remake? Partly, butmore than that is the homage, or the “added value” that text Bcan derive from its relationship to text A. And, unless we findourselves in a deliberately postmodern context, we do not see, infilm, any kind of intended desecration, subversion, or delegit-imization.

In the case of the remake, we might adopt the definition thatUmberto Eco proposes in his “Tipologia della Ripetizione” (inCasetti, 1984 and Eco, 1985) whereby the remake is seen as avariant of the tracing “to reformulate a popular story withoutthe consumer being made aware of it” (Casetti, 1984, p. 23).The tracing, together with the revival, the series, the saga and the

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phenomena around dialogism, make up a part of the system ofseriality. The remake, in this view, is seen as an “explicit anddeclared tracing” (Casetti, 1984, p. 23).

This however is a purely taxonomic definition. Moreover, inthe examples used to illustrate it, rather vague. It does not allowus to advance our discussion. We might then return to Genette’s(1982, p. 1) discussion of the phenomena of “transtextuality”(defined as “everything that places a text, visibly or secretly, inrelation with other texts”) and, in particular, to the hypertextual-ity which orders the relationship between the original text A(the hypotext) and the derivative text B (the hypertext). Hyper-textuality can be the product of both direct and indirect trans-formation (with the latter presupposing the mediation of a sys-tem—a genre, for example). Each kind of transformation, whencrossed with various systems (the playful, the satirical, the seri-ous), gives rise to six different forms which, in toto, also apply toand locate the various forms of the film remake. This is true inparticular in the case of processes of direct transformation in a“serious” system, the rubric under which most aspects of filmremakes fall. Genette identifies this process as one of transposi-tion. This term, “transposition,” might generate confusionbecause, in cinema studies, it is most often used to describe theadaptation of a film from a literary work, or a play, a comicstrip, etc. But in fact, Genette’s schema avoids such ambiguitybecause it refers only to relationships within a single medium,whereas the examples given above are not only intertextual butalso intermedial.

In fact the film remake is often bound up with intermediali-ty; this can be seen, for example, in the case of remaking a tele-vision series. But I believe it would be more useful, given thedifficulty and state of uncertainty in which we find ourselves, todiscuss a limited definition of the remake before moving on to awider definition which would encompass the notion of interme-diality and thus forms of literary (and theatrical, etc.) transposi-tion, in the common sense of the term. The limited definition Ipropose, then, involves confronting a text B with a prior text A,where both texts belong to the same medium. I don’t deny thatThe Postman Always Rings Twice by Bob Rafelson (1981) could

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be considered a remake of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943),but certainly the strongest link between them is their relation-ship to the novel by James M. Cain. It is this second kind oflink which brings us, as I have said, to a wider definition of theremake. But it would be imprudent to tackle this definitionbefore clearing up a few questions about the limited definition.

A recent collection of essays proposes that adaptations of lit-erary texts and plays to the cinema be described as “remakes.”This collection is Letteratura e cinema. Il remake (Bussi andChiaro, 1999), published by the Scuola Superiore di LingueModerne per Interpreti e Traduttori (The Higher Institute ofModern Languages for Interpreters and Translators) in Forlì(University of Bologna). What we are in the presence of here, Ibelieve, is not so much eager scholarship or the extension of anidea’s meaning, but rather a misunderstanding, one which illus-trates quite well the difficulty we find ourselves in.

This study is representative, once again, of the backwardnessof research into this issue in cinema studies. The critical litera-ture on the remake may seem vast, but it is made up almostentirely of descriptions, or of limited comparative analyses ofpaired texts, carried out according to the most diverse andunsystematic criteria. Attempts to define the remake are vagueand often tautological. And proposals for classifying remakes aresometimes irresistibly (if unwittingly) Borgesian.

The most recent contribution, and certainly the best known,is the book Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, edited byAndrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal and published by theUniversity of California Press in 1998. Among the numerousessays that make up the volume, one that is noteworthy isRobert Eberwein’s “Remakes and Cultural Studies.” Eberweinsituates the remake within the field of reception studies and setsout a detailed classification schema in which fifteen possibletypes of remake are identified. This schema starts out with themost sensible and indisputable examples (sound remakes ofsilent films, colour remakes of black-and-white films, remakesby the same director, U.S. remakes of European films), but fin-ishes off with examples which could only have been inspired bya Dada sensibility, such as: remakes in which the sex of one of

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the characters changes; remakes in which the race of one of thecharacters changes; and the “remake of a sequel to a film that isitself the subject of multiple remakes” (Eberwein, 1998, p. 30).

A similar classification system (similar in its unintended Dadaspirit, I mean) can be found in a special issue of the journalCinémAction. Here the field is divided into three categories:films based on films; films based on films which are based inturn on non-film works; and films based on non-film works(Protopopoff and Serceau, 1989, pp. 6-11). But in the intro-ductory essay by guest editor Protopopoff (1989, p. 13), thereis a remark which merits further study and which we shouldpursue: “The remake,” Protopopoff writes, “effaces its age.” Theremake, then, alters the chronology we assign to a film—its“history.”

III.Let’s take stock of and reflect upon the discussion thus far.

Genette, in his discussion of literature that refashions an exist-ing literary system (and not “the world”), speaks of processeswhereby old forms are invested with new meaning. But it is noteven clear if this is what a remake is. At least, in its commonform it isn’t, for here what is emphasised is updating meaningrather than transforming or reinterpreting it. It is also true thatin the film remake the relationship to the pre-existing text is oneof attempting to obtain proof of legitimacy, to be granted author-itativeness. We are in the presence of a basic technique: the factthat the story already exists gives greater force to the new ver-sion. There is here a need to link up with something whichalready exists, in a manner not unlike that of the sequel. This isa curious thing: the remake, then, is born of a fear of the new(whether this be on the level of the narrative structure or of thefilm’s relationship to its viewers). It is as if an unknown story isseen as a sort of leap in the dark, as a communicative wager thatis too risky to undertake.

The remake puts its trust in the plot (independently of thedisclosure of the mysteries of the plot and thus similar in a wayto the way fables operate). It puts its trust in the characters andthe situations. But it can also put its trust in style. In this sense

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the remake reveals cinema to be a highly mannerist medium.This is one topic that should certainly be investigated, andwhich was suggested in an old issue of the journal Cinema &Cinema in 1984. The remake distrusts, however, the work’s lifespan. Its starting principle is that the relationship a work estab-lishes with its viewers lasts only briefly. In this sense it intro-duces considerable anomalies into chronological order and theidea of cinema as a system with a progressive and linear develop-ment.

On the other hand, the remake puts its trust in the pleasure ofthe viewer in juxtaposing and comparing. It assumes that itsviewer is an intertextual viewer (in Riffaterre’s sense of theterm). It bases its own workings on an effet de lecture, on inter-pretive study—on the possibility that the work will be carriedfurther by the viewer (Samoyault, 2001, p. 16). But is this real-ly the case? This phenomenon is probably restricted to a smallcircle of cinephilic viewers. The general public seems instead to“acquire” this possibility without ever making use of it and toremain at the level of the most immediate relationship with thefilm, the superficial level of the story.

IV.We have posed only a few questions (and we are not even cer-

tain that they are the right questions). Other definitions andother voices can take us further. One example is the definitiongiven by Guido Fink (1984), in the issue of Cinema & Cinema Imentioned above. Fink sees the remake as offering the text asecond chance, as a landfall born of the desire to improve a workby adding some elements or removing other, superficial ele-ments. The idea, which he barely sketches out (the suggestion isbased on a short story by Henry James from 1893, “The MiddleYears”), should be more fully explored. To give a text a secondchance, to allow it to fulfil what it wasn’t able to do the firsttime, does not mean simply giving the characters or the situa-tion a new opportunity. It means providing the text, on the levelof its formal structure, its narrative organisation, and its verytechnological means, a second opportunity. The idea of a sec-ond chance, also developed from an analysis of methods of

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adaptation, of the relationship between cinema and literature,seems to me to be a seductive one just the same. It is a secondopportunity offered to the same characters to re-enact a gesture,reconsider a choice, relive an adventure, while retaining thememory of the previous adventure or, better yet, remaining wiserfrom the previous experience. This is an analytical model whichhas not yet been adequately developed.

One of the most precise theoretical formulations of theremake comes, unexpectedly, from a text by Borges entitled“Pierre Ménard, autor del Quijote” (which Genette, among oth-ers, has drawn authoritative attention to), in his book Ficciones(1944). The narrator of this piece rewrites, in identical fashion,Cervantes’ masterpiece. And this rewriting—which, I repeat, isidentical—makes it possible for the text to enter into a new andcompletely different context. Reformulated in the twentiethcentury, Cervantes’ expressions acquire completely differentmeanings. The style of the novel itself seems different.

Borges’ extreme example (but not entirely unique: Gus VanSant did something similar with Hitchcock’s Psycho) reveals afundamental aspect of every process of remaking: the text is putin a different network of meaning and different cultural sys-tems. Every remake, then, is a recontextualisation, an insertion ofthe text into a new network of circumstances, independently ofany way in which the text may be updated (in the case ofMénard’s Don Quixote, there is no updating whatsoever). Thisreproposal of the work, understood as a creative act and not as acopying or re-issuing, alters the work even if it remains identicalto itself. The remake thus seems to function as a reconfiguringof the original text into a new, contemporary setting, wherenothing is as it was the first time around. Under the guise ofrepetition, the remake surreptitiously introduces a system ofgeneralised novelty and originality, which becomes all the moreremarkable the greater the similarity of the text to the original.

The remake (Borges again) manifests itself under the sign ofanachronism, corresponding to the shifting forward of a text andits operativity. To remake is the equivalent of altering the naturalorder of film history, as it alters literary history. It functions bytearing a text out of the chronological position it has been

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assigned and relocating it in the present, reformulating everyaspect of its meaning and style. This rending may be irreparable,and the text thereby isolated will be marked for all time by thistemporal extraterritoriality. Borges’ observations were for themost part concerned with a work’s textual dimension. But if weexamine the ideas of Lubomír Dolezel in his book Heterocosmica(1998), we find a different suggestion: to refer, for processesassociated with the remake, to fictional worlds, to universeswhich “gain a semiotic existence independent of the construct-ing texture” (p. 202). These worlds interact, moreover, with an“active cultural memory,” however autonomous or independentof the form of the original narration. This is the model of trans-duction, which enjoins the processes that construct a fictionalworld, and which we should take into consideration here.

What is interesting about Dolezel’s proposal is that it confirmsthe central role of achronia in the process of creating a remake. Inthis context, rewriting is always a “challenge to the past” (Dolezel,1998, p. 206). By re-examining this passage, and other earlierclues, we can see that the idea of reworking a past work is foreignto the remake. In fact the very idea of the past is effaced. We arethus dealing with a phenomenon that is completely distinct from“second degree literature,” which is of the same order as criticalcommentary and creates historical distance. In the remake, thefact that a given subject was filmed ten, fifteen or twenty yearsearlier appears accidental. The gesture of recuperation seems towant to redeem the subject from having been deployed too soon.

Dolezel identifies three kinds of rewriting, which correspond tothree situations in the fictional worlds. The first is that of “parallelworlds,” in which “transposition preserves the design and themain story of the protoworld [that is, of the original world], butlocates it in a different spatial or temporal environment” (Dolezel,1998, p. 206). The second is that of “complementary worlds,”where expansion “extends the scope of the protoworld by fillingits gaps, constructing a prehistory or a posthistory” (p. 207). Andthe third is that of “polemic worlds,” in which displacement “con-structs an essentially different version of the protoworld, redesign-ing its structure and reinventing its story” (p. 207). This approachinterprets the issue of the film remake in a highly persuasive way.

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Moreover, by taking our cue from the processes pointed out bythe author with reference to the rewriting of texts which belongto the Western “canon,” we can conjecture that a relationshipbetween text and classic text is always present in the remake, in thesense that the remake always treats the text it acts upon as classic.Remaking extracts a text from the continuum of film history andgives it an ulterior, added value. But not only this. It transformsthe text into a classic text, that is into an object in which linguis-tic forms and elements of meaning act in a canonical, stylisedfashion. In many texts (hypotexts or protoworlds) this is a funda-mental operation and transformation. The heart of this processconsists of attributing to the original system the quality of amythic tale and establishing its elements as archetypes.

We might think of this as another peculiarity of the remake,whose outcomes and repercussions concern the text being subject-ed to rewriting and refashioning. This process can manifest itself inthe context of an intermedial rewriting (such as making a film outof a literary text), but it is the remake which marks a decisive turnin this sense. In literature, moreover, the kind of rewriting thattakes place always “activates as a cognitive background the fictionalencyclopedia” (Dolezel, 1998, p. 222) of the classic original world.This is less true in the cinema: the classic quality of the text beingrewritten is more often established by the act of rewriting itself.

V.We have, perhaps, taken a few steps forward. We have identi-

fied a few phenomena which are closely linked to the practice ofremaking and which are capable of accounting for its wide-spread use and effectiveness. We are thus in a position to broachthe opacity of this topic. Twenty years ago, in his Palimpsestes,Genette reclaimed pleasure and defended the desire to love“texts two at a time.” He spoke of an “open structuralism,” of a“palimpsestuous reading” (1982, p. 557). It seems to me thatfew people, and not only in cinema studies, have responded tothis challenge and this seduction.

Translated by Rachel Reid and Timothy Barnard

University of Udine

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCESBorges, 1981: Jorge Luis Borges,“Pierre Ménard autor del Quijote,” Obras Completas,Barcelona, María Kodona y Emecé, [1944] 1981, pp. 444-450.Bussi and Chiaro, 1999: Elisa Bussi and Delia Chiaro (eds.), Letteratura e cinema. IlRemake, Bologna, Clueb, 1999.Casetti, 1984: Francesco Casetti (ed.), L’immagine al plurale, Venice, Marsilio, 1984.Dolezel, 1998: Lubomír Dolezel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds,Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.Eberwein, 1998: Robert Eberwein, “Remakes and Cultural Studies,” in AndrewHorton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds.), Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes,Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998.Eco, 1985: Umberto Eco, Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Milan, Bompiani, 1985.Fink, 1984: Guido Fink, “Elogio della seconda chance,” Cinema & Cinema, no. 39,1984.Genette, 1982: Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes, Paris, Seuil, 1982.Genette, 1994: Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art I. Immanence et transcendance, Paris,Seuil, 1994.Genette, 1997: Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art II. La relation esthétique, Paris, Seuil,1997.Goodman, 1968: Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill, 1968.Horton and McDougal, 1998: Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (eds.), Playit Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998.Protopopoff and Serceau, 1989: Michel Serceau and Daniel Protopopoff (eds.), “Leremake et l’adaptation,” special issue of CinémAction, no. 53, 1989.Riffaterre, 1979: Michael Riffaterre, La Production du texte, Paris, Seuil, 1979.Riffaterre, 1983: Michael Riffaterre, Sémiotique de la poésie, Paris, Seuil, 1983.Samoyault, 2001: Tiphaine Samoyault, L’Intertextualité. Mémoire de la littérature,Paris, Nathan, 2001.

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